Guy de Maupassant’s “Afloat” (NYRB Classics, 105 pages, $14) is the memoir of a failed vacation. Immediately translated upon publication in 1889, it has since been out of print in English. Douglas Parmée’s fresh new translation brings to light a book that, more so than any of his renowned short stories, shows Maupassant the man, as he might have been known to contemporary readers of his copious journalism in fin de siècle Paris. Recounting a short week spent yachting on the French Riviera, Maupassant’s fictionalized memoir crystallizes the mixed motives that lead to so many of our vacations. He is at once cynical and Romantic; he is a misanthrope who can’t get enough of man; he is a sophisticated raconteur who wants to talk to himself for a while.

Maupassant was Flaubert’s disciple. The master famously instructed young Maupassant to describe the horses in a cab stand in such a way that he could never mistake one horse for another. But Maupassant became a much more breezy writer than Flaubert, lacking his mentor’s perfectionism. The most obvious thing he inherited from Flaubert was not a kind of language, but a way of ironically quoting bourgeois commonplaces, making clichés come alive, fleetingly, as they wriggled on his skewer. But here again, he lacks Flaubert’s assured touch, and sometimes seems to inhabit cliché too comfortably. This is what makes some of his short stories so delicious: His characters will have all the outsize charm of a stereotype.

Insofar as Maupassant has a lazy side, it comes out more clearly in the unconstrained ruminations of “Afloat” than in the famous short stories such as “Butterball” or “The Necklace.” Those stories are pitiless, but the narrator of “Afloat” is a man, not an author, and without the formal pressure of the short story he wavers, emotionally. At first, he wants to shun the coast; to live for a while at sea. He can be moralistic, in the vein of Victor Hugo, belaboring the coexistence of princes and consumptives in the resort cities: “in every hotel, Death has his secret staircase, his secret agents and accomplices.” He can be shocking in his disdain, describing the chitchat at these same hotels, the hot air that “makes your heart bleed.” Upon hearing the innocent inanities of fellow tourists, he reports that “it seems to me that I’m looking into their ghastly souls and discovering a monstrous fetus preserved in alcohol.” This is the severity that many contemporary critics mistook for naturalism.

Maupassant reminds us that nihilism depends on exaggeration and, in many cases, narcissism, as when he compares the loneliness of his bobbing boat to the human condition. “I can feel the extent to which nothing that we know really exists, since the earth, afloat in empty space, is even more isolated, more lost than this boat drifting on the waves.” This image is not as stark as it wants to be: It has a winsome grandeur that we associate with earlier, more definitely Romantic writers.

His style, unlike Flaubert’s, is very much a piece of the 19th century, and it embodies a 19th-century attitude to tourism. Of the coastal mountains of Provençal, he writes: “It’s an odd coastline, rugged, pretty, full of little spits and innumerable tiny bays; it’s charming and capricious, a thousand fantastic bits of mountain to admire.” To our ears, it sounds flippant to refer to a thousand bits of mountain, but Maupassant was trying to be impressionistic, and “Afloat” survives to the extent that today’s reader can tack in the gusts of such breeziness. Also, his attitudes toward race are deplorable.

Despite its essentially digressive nature — imagine “Moby Dick” on a yacht — “Afloat” adds up to a unified story of disenchantment. Maupassant tells us that he has two weeks’ worth of food on board, but he eats most of his meals in port. He goes fishing, he tours a battleship, he climbs to the desolate ruins of a cloister, but after about a week he accepts a friend’s invitation to Monte Carlo. Along the way, he condemns war, bemoans the self-consciousness of all writers, and halfheartedly criticizes the dynamics of salon life. None of his ideas are unconventional — “the mediocrity of the universe” volunteers itself as a mediocre concept — but they add up to the sympathetic record of a man who can’t quite convince himself he has gotten away from it all, or anything.

The set pieces — stories overheard, observed, or recalled along the way — all serve Maupassant’s theme. Most moving is the simple episode in which Maupassant watches a pair of lovers on shore, and then returns to sit up all night on the deck of his boat. “Their aura was filling the whole bay, the whole night, the sky, vast symbols of love stretching far out to the horizon.” Maupassant, we know, is promiscuous, and he very lightly suggests that his ambivalence about the land is an ambivalence about what today we call commitment.

But when he finally caves and gives in to the call of civilization, he finds that his bachelor’s fantasy, of life unmoored, was justified. In the very den of the casino, he finds the lovers, no longer trusting each other, placing a bet that wipes them out completely.

blytal@nysun.com